文部科学省科学研究費補助金「新学術領域研究」
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Outreach: "Fascination of Plants Day"
This blog posting is a bit late, but I'd like to report back on our involvement in a great new international science outreach event, known as "Fascination of Plants Day".
Launched in Europe, the purpose of Fascination of Plants Day is to provide some coordination of different outreach events and increase the national and international profiles of different events. There is no pre-defined format or requirements, people who are interested in holding an event to promote their research or help convey to the public the importance of plant research just get in touch with their national coordinator to get some information and register their event to increase their own profile (I'm actually one of the national coordinators for Japan too, so if you want more information just let me know!). There is also a local japan page with listing of all the events held this year -> click here.
The official date for Fascination of Plants Day was 18 May this year, but events were held throughout the whole month of May.
This year, we host students from Nemuro Keiun Junior High School. They spent the morning here doing some plant tissue culture experiments, seeing what a university lab is like and even trying the cafeteria food! The students had to come up with a hypothesis related to the roles of hormones in onion growth, then prepare samples that they take back and observe for 4 weeks. Based on these observations they determined whether their hypotheses were correct or not and let us know. It was a great day and lots of fun and smiles all around!
Changing the public image of a scientist:
One of the other really interesting things we did was ask students to send in drawings and comments before they visited our lab, and then again after they returned home from the visit. This was based on a similar activity done at the Fermilab). This was a very rewarding experience, since it showed how we helped to improve how students thought of scientists. Here are two examples:
Student A: "My image of scientists has changed completely 180 degrees, I used to think they were strict and boring, but now I know they are really cool and friendly people!"
Student B: "Scientists are not hard-headed but really friendly and interesting people! There are lots of cool female scientists too!"
Lots of photos of the event can be found on the following page:
-> click here.
Probably the best example is the following photo:
We are currently in discussions about doing a similar thing in Japan next year, it would be great to see more labs getting involved and more events being held! If you're interested in becoming involved, just let me know!
Derek Goto
Hokkaido University
文部科学省科学研究費補助金「新学術領域研究」
